A September 2000 conference call between Yahoo's chief scientist and Manuel Blum's group produced Gimpy, distorted words drawn from an 850-word dictionary, and a bet that every broken test would be an AI problem solved.
By Chris PirilloRead the story
A September 2000 conference call between Yahoo's chief scientist and Manuel Blum's group produced Gimpy, distorted words drawn from an 850-word dictionary, and a bet that every broken test would be an AI problem solved.
By Chris PirilloRead the story
Kevin Raymond's MIT-licensed florilegium package paints watercolor floral margins in Lua while TeX typesets the page: no images, no imported paths, and page n always gets garden n. It started as an answer to a Reddit question.
By Chris PirilloRead the story
Lexifina's CC0 global-law repository pins 107 corpora of national law as git submodules, interleaved by the date each change took force, with a read-only MCP server so an AI model can quote what a statute said on a given day.
By Chris PirilloRead the story
ThinkRail, a JetBrains incubator project under Apache-2.0, wraps the pi coding agent in a desktop IDE where every task is its own git worktree, and a finished one settles onto a shelf by itself. Version 0.3.0 shipped October 29.
By Chris PirilloRead the story
Drew Breunig's nesformer puts a 6502 CPU, 2 KB of RAM and a cartridge's program ROM inside a stock Qwen3.5 checkpoint. Nobody trained the weights; a compiler computed every one, and the model plays games by predicting the CPU's execution log.
By Chris PirilloRead the story
The open-sourced Micropolis code, Electronic Arts' release of the SimCity engine, shows Simulate() stepping a counter from 0 to 15 so map scans, taxes, power, pollution, crime, population and fire each take a turn instead of running every frame.
By Chris PirilloRead the story
Bill Shepherd, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev docked two days later as the station's first long-term crew, and stayed until March 2001.
Satoshi Nakamoto sent it to a cryptography mailing list at 2:10 p.m. Eastern, describing electronic cash that is "peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party."
Microsoft closed its Encarta encyclopedia websites everywhere except Japan, which got two more months. By then Wikipedia had about 97 percent of US online encyclopedia visits and Encarta had 1.27 percent.
Microsoft's Messenger closed in mainland China, its last holdout, a year and a half after it shut down everywhere else. A locally run service bought it the extra time.
Luigi checks into a haunted hotel called the Last Resort, armed with the Poltergust G-00 and Gooigi, a gooey clone who dissolves in water.
1975: A digital camera's resolution: 10,000 pixels. Today: 200 megapixels. Steve Sasson's Kodak prototype weighed 3.6 kg and took a 100-by-100-pixel picture that needed 23 seconds to record to tape; the Galaxy S26 Ultra's main camera is 200 MP, and 200,000,000 divided by 10,000 is 20,000 times the pixels.
